Passed 50K

Today I passed 50k. Twice.

The first time was the standard sort of passing, where I input everything I had into the validator and voila! purple bar!

Then I went back and deleted my pile of discard words. In every WIP, I keep a "Volume 0" where I dump all the stuff I wrote, decided I disliked, and replaced with complete rewrites. I ended up with around 1500 discarded words for Edward. So I deleted and validated again to see how many words I had to replace to make it past 50k. It turned out to only be around 700 or so, so I did that and passed it again.

Now I'm at 51,750 words (including the discards). The story isn't done yet, though it might be somewhat close, so I'm going to press on with the remaining time and see how far I can get by Friday night. I'm not so much moving forward as I am backfilling some scenes that were missing. There's at least one more of those to do - an important conversation between Charles and James. After that I should be all set for the climax ritual that changes everything and everyone.

In a broader sense, this story seems to be a three-parter. The first 20k were focused on Edward. This second 30-35k seems to be focused mainly on Charles. After that there ought to be another (at least) 10k that focuses on James. Whether I'll actually write the part about James anytime soon is still debatable, as I've got basically nothing at all in mind for what happens to him after he goes back to Lagarnica. I might not be able to until after I finish the Emerald Sword story, because that's what will set up how Lucien Duchene (their father) got to be the way he is by the beginning of Edward.

And of course the other fork is what happens to Edward and Charles, which hopefully will explain where Fortress Launne came from. At least, that's what the story was supposed to be for originally. I hope it still ends up that way. We'll see. ;)